Tag Archives: garden

Perk up salads, make your own meat rubs and sweeten up your Iced tea with herbs from your garden. These recipes from my seminar at the 2017 Northwest Flower & Garden Show are perfect to make now while there is an abundance of herbs in the garden to harvest and preserve.

Herbed Lime RubThis is one of my favorites. I love a kick of lemon and lime on many things and this has just enough zip to it that it can be used as an all-purpose sprinkle on salads. Use as a dry rub to flavor meat as you are prepping them for the grill. Just the right zest for chicken and salmon.
1/3 cup Sea salt (coarse, grind)
1 teaspoon lime zest (add more to taste)
1 teaspoon dried Garlic granules
1/2 teaspoon dried Italian flat leaf parsley
Mix all ingredients well. Keep the blend chunky for meat rubs. You can grind this blend down (in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle) to a finer mix for use as a seasoning salt.

Rosemary Smoked SaltAromatic salts make this the perfect mix for beef and heavy sauces using tomatoes. Nice strong herbal mix for use to season meats while grilling.
1 cup coarse smoked salt
1/4 cup dried rosemary leaves (whole)
1 tablespoon dried garlic granules
Mix all ingredients together. Crushed the mix slightly with a mortar and pestle to release the essence of the rosemary and garlic into the mix. Store in a glass spice shaker.

Lavender sel et poivre (salt and pepper)An elegant salad seasoning. This lighter tasting mix can be used on chicken and pork to season.
1 tablespoon dried lavender buds
3 tablespoons coarse French grey sea salt
Ground peppercorns to taste (approximately a 1/2 teaspoon).
Mix all ingredients together. Grind down if you want the mix to be finer and able to sprinkle through a shaker top. Store in a glass spice shaker.

Tie small bundles of herbs together and allow them to dry. Once they are dry strip the leaves from the stems, mix in something that tingles the taste buds like salt, pepper or a citrus zest. Slightly crush together so that the essential oils from the herbs blend together in the mix.
Package the mix in small metal tins and label.

Travelogue Wales: South of Abergavenny, just over an hour drive past Raglan Castle was a visit to a private garden. We walked down a small gravel lane off the main highway to a gate almost hidden under a tree. A hand-written sign led into the garden of Anne Wareham author of the book, The Bad-Tempered Gardener. Prior to our visit, I did wonder what a bad-tempered gardener’s place would look like (I had not heard of the book.) I don’t remember being bad-tempered in any garden, even when stuff dies, explodes (yep, a hose), overtakes (horsetail, ugh!), and just flat-out defeats me after a day spent in it.Veddw House Garden

The artistry of hedging at Veddw

We were greeted near the small conservatory by Anne’s husband, Charles Hawes, a talented, well-known photographer. He mentioned she wasn’t home (I won’t spend too much space here telling who I later saw sneaking out the back door, while I was alone photographing one of the back gardens.)

A peek inside the Conservatory

Charles gave us a warm welcome and spoke about the garden before he let us explore on our own. His described it as “a garden with edges being rough and ready”, which is a good visual for the way the lush planting borders threaten to spill over and have the run of the place. I did like his description of simply letting the plants “have it out”. As I looked around, it made me think how I’d love to pursue that garden method.

“I have met gardeners who make the sign of the cross at the sight of Alchemilla. This is because it seeds itself so generously. Well. be grateful that there is such a beautiful essential plant that does that for us and then find a good use for it.” Anne Wareham, The Bad-Tempered Gardener

After our visit to the garden, I had a lucky find-out of thousands of used books crammed on a shelf in a little book shop at Hay-On-Wye (a village famous for books. The streets are lined with dozens of used and antiquarian bookshops.) Here area few snippets from the book:

What do you think? Bad tempered?“Gardening is boring. It is repetitious, repetitive and mind-blowingly boring, just like housework. All of it-sowing seeds, mowing, cutting hedges, potting up, propagating is boring and all if it requires doing over and over again. If there are enjoyable jobs they’re mostly enjoyable for the result, not the process.” Anne Wareham, The Bad-Tempered Gardener

Or simply telling it like it is

“The very best trick is to try things and see. Experiment; take risks, particularly if they involve less work. This way innovation rises and innovation is badly needed in the gardening world. If a job seems exasperating, expensive or boring, stop and think whether there might be an easier way. Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible. If they don’t like what you offer, offer them something else quickly and see if it suits better.” Anne Wareham, The Bad-Tempered Gardener

A medieval themed wedding was taking place one of the nights we stayed at Ruthin. When I was out taking photos, I spied a little boy dressed in a knight costume having a sword fight with an imaginary foe. He was happy to pose for me showing his knightly fierceness.

Raglan Castle
If these wall could talk, they would reveal much. A walk through the grounds of Raglan conjures the visuals you see in the movies- knights in armor and raucous candlelit meals spread out on long wooden tables. In the ruins there are just enough outlines of windows, walls and rooms of this castle that it lets your imagination run. You can almost see heavy tapestries and ornate fixtures dripping with the wax of lit candles hanging on the walls.
Touching the stone was like a vibration of its past. It is fascinating to see ancient stone that has stood for generations, solid, yet crumbling down.
The misty rain on the day of our visit, helped to create the perfect setting to walk and be drawn away into history. Just imagine how many generations passed through the stately entry.

Powis is a fortress and country manor that remains one of the few castles in Wales kept carefully preserved throughout its 700 year history. At first glimpse the gardens around the castle grounds seem nondescript, but as you weave your way down along the elegant baroque-style balustrades and terraces, the gardens become more magnificent. Mixed plantings, massive billowing yew hedges and lush shrub borders are the immense framework that beautifully overwhelm the huge castle grounds. Every terrace, as you work your way down, shows different design influences. They weave to Italianate style, making way to the original orangery and then stepping down to the classic Edwardian herbaceous borders.

The view from the terraces to the formal garden and croquet lawn.

The veg and fruit gardens have been renovated to be more formal and decorative than productive.

Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’
This silvery leaved perennial was introduced by the head gardener of Powis Castle in in the 1970’s. In 1993 the plant received the Royal Horticulture Society’s Award of Garden Merit. Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ is believed to be a hybrid between the Artemisiaarborescens (large wormwood) and Artemisiaabsinthium (absinthe wormwood). The Genus is named for Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon. Hint, hint…plant this in a moon garden to illuminate the garden by the light of a full moon.

Like this:

Somewhere around the year 2000, I read about a project in England that was a bit unusual. Was it a garden or was it a sci-fi movie set? This was not one of those classic English gardens of long historic reverence. This was a dream of Tim Smit who spearheaded the restoration of Heligan (upcoming post of a visit with the mud maiden, stay tuned). The Eden Project was a crazy concept to create a series of Biomes banked in the crevice of a giant china clay pit that scarred the beautiful Cornish countryside. His vision was to have massive greenhouses that allow people to see “…a living laboratory showing plants we depend on, seeing them as they grow in the wild together, a living demonstration…” I followed the stories of it’s building progress and read the controversy and challenges it has gone through. Satellite photos on the internet make it look like big pieces of bubble wrap tucked in the earth. It has always made me curious.The second bucket list check mark.

This was a treat to walk out of the visitor’s center and down into the large pit and say, I can’t believe I am seeing this for real . Yep, I am pretty simple to please! Give me a garden to visit and you’d think you’d given me a million bucks.

The best part of the Eden Project beyond those amazing Biomes is the education and sustainability mission. All the water used to keep the huge rainforest dome bathing in humidity and to flush the toilets is collected rainwater. Energy is generated from the huge wind turbines around Cornwall. Kids and families, were everywhere, walking through this learning lab of plants both inside and out of the domes. I want an Eden here to take my grand-babies to and share in the magic of growing plants and learning about flora from all over the world.
There is much more to say about this unique project and this post could get long, but probably best to let you catch these links later and fill this post with my photos.

Gardens outside the Biomes–reclaiming this old china clay pit into a lush garden

What is a bucket list? A list of things, whether written out or virtual, of places to go or things to do before you die. Mine is also known as the “someday” list and includes gardens I’d like to visit. I could walk through gardens all day, every day, but sometimes one I have read about captures my imagination. I think about what it would be like to walk in and get sensory overload just by being there. Touch, smell, feel-those things photos or the internet can never do.Aberglasney in Wales was added to my bucket list in 2007. I attended a lecture in Seattle given by the head gardener, Graham Rankin. It was a story of a garden lost in time (a book and BBC series) and its restoration. Just the idea of how a garden and home of that magnitude dating back 500 years, could simply disappear into rubble, was fascinating. Looking at the photos, I envisioned myself walking along the upper course of the Elizabethan cloister garden. Back then, I never thought I would get to Wales, so visiting this garden was on my list, but really almost forgotten. Fast-forward to 2015 and the planning stages of traveling with a group to the UK. I notice we will be staying in Abergavenny. My mind began to wonder, is it possible that Abergavenny is near the Aberglasney on my bucket list? Google maps said it was just over an hour drive away. It wasn’t on our itinerary, but I couldn’t get THAT close and not go! Uber, cab, bike, hitchhike, walk…I had to figure it out. Marianne, our tour planner, did some searching to add it to our itinerary and found out they were closed on our one free day in the area. NO! But, yes, with Marianne’s keen negotiation, Aberglasney was added for a visit on the longest day of the year with dinner included.Misty eyed
It was late afternoon in the lovely country side of Wales. As we drove up the coach parking, I felt lost. Was this the place I had seen in photos? It just didn’t look right. We started in the restored main entry of the house, and then walked through a door at the back of the room. It opened to the Ninfarium and that was the moment I recognized it from the photos that Graham Rankin had shown; I almost started to cry. Yep, that’s me (what a nerd), I had a moment of overwhelming gratefulness that I could travel and walk through this place that I had only seen in photos.

The Ninfarium, the central ruins of the house covered with glass to create an atrium.

The Cloister Garden

All the lovely angles of ancient stone in the Cloister Garden

A look back at the house from the Upper Walled Garden

A walk through the Yew tunnel planted in the 18th century.

The Kitchen Garden

It was magical for us to spend the summer solstice walking the gardens with head gardener Joseph Atkin. Dinner was cooked from food grown in the lower walled kitchen garden and served on the terrace overlooking the pool garden as the sun was setting. The perfect way to check
this one off the bucket list. And yes, I finally got to take the walk I had only imagined, on the upper part of the cloister walls, what a view! If your journey ever takes you into the heart of Wales, you must go visit this place.

Gardens by a few degrees of separation: I visited a garden in LaMalbaie, Quebec, Canada, Les Jardins de Quatre-Vent, (checked off my bucket list in 2013) that has ties to Aberglasney. Frank Cabot and family, owners of Les Quatre Vent, gave money to help with the restoration of Aberglasney. Add the gardens of Les Quatre Vent to your bucket list too!

Many have asked how my trip was and sometimes I feel speechless because I can’t put it into quick, casual conversation. And if you know me, you know I love talking about gardens. It was many words from travel over 1700 miles on a coach zigzagging across the countryside of Wales, Cornwall and the Cotswolds.

Come along with me for an exploration of gardens of Wales and England, not in the chronological order of travel sense, but the things that inspired me to write something along the way.

Must start here…
Arrival Heathrow, UGH! You know that place where people who are grumpy from flying get pushed into the dungeon of this mega airport to get their passports checked. Emerging into daylight, the swath of English lavender blooming reminded me where I had just landed. The aromatic journey begins.

English Roses
In my gardening realm, all I hear is roses are too hard to take care of and disease”y”, aphid magnets. I tend to agree unless they are the tough ol’ Rugosas. I have moved into a new place recently and there are a few old rose bushes (not Rugosa!) that are fabulous and now after this trip I have fallen in love with growing roses again.

casting shadows on the walls of Kiftsgate manor

The “Kiftsgate” rose at Kiftsgate Manor was not in bloom as we had hoped. It was just its rampant, huge tangle of crazy that I remember from a visit in 2005, but as we walked through gardens over the next few weeks, it seemed like every other rose in the UK was blooming! Everywhere, scrambling up walls and in the middle of mixed borders, mixing and mingling all over the place.
So this first travelogue are some photos of those heavenly fragrant English roses all over Wales and England. It does seem unfair to give you a look, but not a smell of how a rose in Britain on a warm day in June fills the air with perfume.

A sweet tango with Thalictrum

Roses and hedges, so very Sissinghurst

Kiftsgate, Sissinghurst, Aberglasney, Veddw, Heligan, Eden

Join me on my blog for more photos and musings from my trip.

This trip was one of those I looked forward to and panicked as well, it is one of the busiest times of year for my landscape design business but a chance to visit and study gardens and the renovation of properties lost in the past to ruins. Two places were on my bucket list and we saw so many more that I never knew should have been on my list.

As drought reveals itself in the Pacific Northwest, we watch our typical lush, green surroundings turn shades of tan. Just like the hot weather, watering the garden is a hot topic.
Here is what water-wise gardeners should know:The obvious…plants need water.
The less obvious, how they get it and survive. Watering the leaves to cool off the plant probably feels like you are doing something good for the garden, but most of the time, little water gets down to the roots. Think of it like this: imagine you are thirsty and instead of taking a drink of water, you take a shower. You might feel cooler, but it does not satisfy the thirst. That is what it is like for plants; they need water in the soil and around their roots to allow the plant to get water to the stems, leaves and flowers.How do you know if you’ve watered enough?Hand check
It can surprising how much time it takes to get water to the needed depth of soil.
Water the garden as you normally do and wait about 10 minutes. Then check your garden’s soil moisture.Take the gloves off and push fingers into the ground around your plants in different areas of the garden. Dig in with a trowel too.
In an area with sufficient water, the soil should be thoroughly moist after each watering…all the way down to the root zone. The top 2 or 3 inches of the soil may be semi-dry, but the soil below that should be moist to a depth of 5 to 6 inches or more.Get down deep
Established plants also need deep watering to keep roots far down into the soil. If they are given water only at the surface, they get lazy and don’t have to work hard for their water. In periods of drought, shallow-rooted plants can’t stay cooled by the soil, so they stress and wimp out. Hanging out with a hose spraying a garden bed or the lawn for 15 minutes just doesn’t do it. It might settle the dust for the day but does not get enough down into the root zone where plants need it. Instead of daily, light water, do a good weekly soaking that allows the soil to become wet to a depth of 6 inches. If your system of watering, either sprinkler or by hand does not do this, adjust to a once a week deep watering to ensure good subsoil moisture that is consistent. Just because it is hot, doesn’t mean you have to water every day. Container gardens are the exception! Plants in the ground need to get the available water from the soil before watering again. Deep water will help roots grow deep.Maybe it’s your soil
Improving your soil’s moisture-holding capacity is as simple as mixing organic compost into your beds. Depending on the type of soil, more organic matter means more water is accessible to plants. Dense clay particles rob most of your soil’s moisture, decreasing the amount of water available to plants while sandy soils drain water too quickly for plants to absorb it. An amendment can help the soil structure of both clay and sandy soils for more efficient water holding.

Timing Matters
In warm weather, water in the morning to give plants a chance to drink up before the hot sun and the wind evaporates moisture. If you can’t water in the morning, try for late afternoon, but not too late. The foliage should have time to dry before the sun goes down to help protect plants that are prone to fungal diseases. Powdery mildew and spider mites love to thrive in warm weather AND moisture.Mulching Matters
Mulch reduces water evaporation by helping to trap moisture on the ground during dry times of the year. Use a good organic compost to help nourish the soil in planting beds. Spread up to 4 inches deep all over landscape beds. Do not pile mulch near the base of plants, keep it shallow to avoid rot. In established planting beds topped with bark, occasionally rake the old mulch to break up the soil surface. A good raking (not scraping) to fluff the surface of the soil will help water penetrate through.Brown lawns are okay.
By the way if you have joined the ranks of the brown lawn brigade, all is well. The heat and lack of moisture have pushed it into dormancy and as soon as natural rainfall returns it will bounce back with vigor. Just don’t allow heavy foot traffic or the dog to tear it up too much. In the spring as it actively begins to grow again, pay extra attention to keeping it healthy.

Like this:

My gardener’s heart knows that to every seed there is a season before it fruits.
But there are times when I crave a fresh dose of greens and can’t want to wait for a harvest from the garden.Sprouts are fresh spice for any time of year. They are low in fat, filled with vitamins, minerals, protein and are ready to eat in about a week.I grab a big pinch of them and eat them as a snack. You can also toss them in scrambled eggs, use in place of lettuce on sandwiches, add to salads and wraps, and garnish the top of hot soup just before serving.Sprouting seeds-Alfalfa is the most common, but there are many that add unique flavors and textures. Broccoli: a nice radish-like bite of flavor.Chia: a bit of a tang, but much like alfalfa sprouts in texture and flavor.Clover: similar in flavor to alfalfa sprouts.Fenugreek: a mild curry-like flavor, exotic flavor,
yummy in chicken wraps.Lentils: a bit of peppery flavorMung Bean: the texture is nice a crispy. Pea-like flavor.Radish: much like the flavor of the vegetable, it will spice up any dish.Sunflower: a nutty flavor, yummy on a hot cup of tomato soup! How-to:Use a clean glass canning jar with a sprout screen as the lid.Clean, and rinse jar to clean well.Add about 1 1/2 teaspoons of seeds to the jarPlace a fine mesh screen on top of jar and tighten metal ring to hold in place.Partially fill the jar with warm (not hot) water and swirl around to clean seeds; pour out water. Refill with warm water and soak overnight.After overnight soak, pour out water and place jar at a slight angle (a counter top dish drainer works well for this) to allow remaining water to run out. Turn jar to spread seed over the inside of the jar. Rinse sprouts daily, up to 2 or 3 times, with cool fresh water-allowing the jar to rest tilted to drain out excess water. Turn jar to spread seeds on the inside of the jar. As they get larger, thicken and green up, place sprouts in indirect light. Repeat rinsing until the sprouts are lush and ready to eat, rinse well and drain before placing in the refrigerator. Keep finished sprouts refrigerated and use within a week.Remember:-Rinse often-Don’t over seed, give them room to breathe.-Keep moist,-not wet.-Sprout at room temperature- keep fresh ready-to-eat ones in the fridge.-Sprout with joy!Resources for seeds and supplies:http://www.mountainroseherbs.comwww.sproutpeople.orghttp://www.botanicalinterests.com

Cynthia Harp and Charity Harp make beautiful music during the 2012 Northwest Flower and Garden show

Re-defining Andante wall detail

The details that make up a garden are the pieces that set the scene. Plants are a given, they go in a garden, but how you design elements around them helps finish the story.
I have always had a weakness for ruins in the garden. I think hugging ancient stone during a garden visit to Montacute in England did it for me. Oh the stories that stone could tell. Ancient stone has personality; weathered with lichen, moss, and age. Hard for man to mimic what nature does. That story telling aspect is what sets the design notes for building ruins in the garden; you get to create a sense of a story.During the process of designing this year’s show garden, many hours were spent on how we would build the backdrop for this garden; a ruins wall that would appear as if an old symphony hall had crumbled down or the music room of an ancient castle had been reclaimed after its partial destruction. We calculated how much stone it would take to stack it and were a bit bemused by the tons of weight we were stressing the convention center floor with. At one point in our designing I negotiated with a local artisan to make the wall. Ben Isitt www.bensartworks.com creates realistic works of art carved from specialized foam. His work is magical and beautiful, but alas he was out of our budget range. What I did learn from Ben was that carved foam could be made to look real and painted to withstand the outdoor elements. Very cool! In the end, a decision was made to create the wall as a temporary structure of foam built by one of our team members. Constructed by Joan Bogan, I wonder if she still is vacuuming bits and pieces of fluttering white foam from the nooks and crannies of her workshop.

In your own garden, we can’t all have a gothic wall but it is more the remnants of things place thoughtfully that create the story.

simple yet effective, columns placed in the water feature give a sense that a wall once existed here.

a lesson in cheap pottery. It broke after a year in the garden, so it became my little ruins